Google Assisting In Funding AI News Writers In Ireland and the UK

Google – the search giant – is giving the Press Association news agency a grant of around €706,000 ($806,000) to begin writing stories with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The Digital News Initiative Fund of a tech giant is helping with the money. The mentioned fund supports digital journalism in Europe.

Skilled human journalists will be vital in the process: Clifton

The Press Association is supplying news stories to the media all over Ireland and the UK. It will be working with Urbs Media – a startup – for producing 30,000 local stories per month with the aid of Artificial Intelligence. Peter Clifton, the editor-in-chief of the Press Association, told The Guardian that “the AI articles will be the product of collaboration with human journalists. Writers will create detailed story templates for topics like crime, health, and unemployment,” according to the report of news site The Verge.

Further, Clifton told the British news outlet that the Radar tool of Urbs Media will clear the confusion and help in localizing the article. Media outlet have used this kind of workflow for several years, including the Los Angeles Times using Artificial Intelligence to write news stories about earthquakes. Clifton said, “Skilled human journalists will still be vital in the process.” He added, “But Radar allows us to harness artificial intelligence to scale up to a volume of local stories that would be impossible to provide manually.”

The money provided by the ads giant could be used to make tools that scrap information from public databases in the UK, like the ones generated by the National Health Service and the councils. In addition to this, the Radar software will auto-generate graphics for stories and add relevant pictures and videos. The software will be in use from 2018.

Here is a startup that could overthrow tech giants in AI smart home products

Apple, Google and other tech giants like Amazon are already trying to make home automation easier and they are continuing to tackle with their own smart speakers and voice assistants. But, when it comes to software interface and voice commands, their devices seem a bit heavy. There is, however, a startup that could make smart speakers and voice assistant a little less clunky.

Josh.ai has raised $11 million recently to design a voice-controlled system for smart homes. It will launch its own hardware, which will be dedicated to this purpose, later this year. The company is focusing more on attempting to tie together after-market devices, such as smart doorbells, smart lights and security cameras.

The AKA speech-to-text (automatic speech recognition) portion of the startup’s system is managed in the cloud whereas the Mac mini takes care of the natural language processing to understand what the commands of the user mean. When it comes to interpreting what a user means, the system of Josh.ai is much better than other company.

Nishtha Singh is a iStartup staff reporter who covers tech news, including review of devices, emerging startups, acquisitions, gadgets, Cars, Cloud, EVs, AR, VR, AI and more. Further, she is a reader, a tech-enthusiast, and a writer. Editor at Teenage Publishing and proof-reader at Evoque Publishing.